What Virgil Actually Built

The most misunderstood thing about Virgil Abloh is that people thought he was making clothes.

He was not making clothes. He was making arguments. The clothes were the medium. The argument was the product.

The argument went something like this. Everything is design. Everything designed carries a cultural meaning that has nothing to do with its function. A chair is not just a chair. A price tag is not just a price tag. A pair of quotation marks around a word changes what the word means without changing the word. The three percent difference between an original and a reference is the space where creativity lives.

Virgil Abloh was a Ghanaian-American designer, architect, and DJ who served as artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear from 2018 until his death in 2021. He founded Off-White in 2012. He was the first Black artistic director of a French luxury house. He studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology and civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was 41 years old when he died.

None of that is what he actually built.

What he built was a permission structure. He gave a generation of people who had grown up between cultures, between price points, between what they were supposed to want and what they actually wanted, a language for the gap. The quotation marks were not irony. They were precision. They said: this thing is exactly what it appears to be and simultaneously something else entirely. The chair is a chair. The chair is also a statement about chairs. Both things are true at the same time.

The furniture he made for his Ikea collaboration sold for hundreds of dollars on resale markets. The rugs sat on floors. The lamps gave light. They did everything the originals did and cost significantly more because they meant something the originals did not. This is not cynicism. This is the oldest logic in craft. The object that carries meaning costs more than the object that does not. It always has.

What nine.ninetyfive is doing is a small version of the same argument. The price tag is not the point. The thought behind the price tag is the point. $9.95 does not describe the value of what is here. It describes the gap between what things cost and what they are worth. Virgil understood that gap better than anyone working in fashion during his lifetime.

He was 41 when he died. He had barely started. RIP PAL.

~ 9.95